


Factor in the Hatred

by temporalDecay



Series: distrait shorts [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Gills, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Masturbation, Nooks, Size Kink, Tentabulges, piercings in places there shouldn't be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 22:47:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/829749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporalDecay/pseuds/temporalDecay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eridan and Equius handle their long-distance kismesissitude to the best of their ability. </p><p>Or, in which Eridan Ampora dots his fucking i's with smileys and Equius Zahhak questions all his life choices.</p><p>(Should probably read <a href="archiveofourown.org/works/741936"><i>Breathe In</i></a> to know how they got to this point, but the story stands well on its own.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Factor in the Hatred

Eridan Ampora dots his i’s with smiley faces. 

This was not a thing you knew or even thought you’d ever come to know. You’re not sure you welcome the knowledge, either. But there it is, invading a corner of your think pan, already comfortable and turning into the kind of thing you’re never going to forget. Dinner today is finger foods, which you suppose is Zephyr’s not so subtle way to let you know you need to relax before you start a riot in the bridge, so you grab a roll of salted fruit, dip it in the offered sauce and plop it into your mouth as you squint in despair at the annotations all over your original plans. He’s turned the text file into high resolution images and written on them in vibrant violet, scribbles all over the place. 

You really want to punch him and the smiley faces aren’t helping. 

Finger food, as it turns out, is great to soothe your worst moods, because there are no forks to dent or knives to break. And there’s something about licking your fingers that’s wired to the baser corners of your pan, and makes you feel comfortable and less likely to do something undignified. You are in a foul mood, you’re willing to admit, when three pages in you realize you’re agreeing with most of the scathing remarks on the margins of your work. The obnoxious thing is that Eridan is usually _right_ when he chews through your attempts at strategy, but you’re never more willing to take his word for it than when you’re wallowing in self-loathing. It’s only proper, after all, to value and accept his input, but only after offering your best rebuttals. That’s how these things work. 

Except if you’re honest with yourself, you can’t keep the protocol as well as you’d like, because one of Eridan’s most attractive qualities as a kismesis is that he’s not stupid. 

Except when he is, which is pretty much always. 

You dip your fingers into the sauce, absently licking and sucking as you go over and over the same line “but fuck that ‘cause no one’s pulled that off since the _Cassiopeia_ in ‘65”, squinting because the name and the date aren’t helping much. That’s unfortunate because the entire meaning of the paragraph hinges on recognizing the ship and the maneuver named after it. You consider looking it up, but it burns your insides with humiliation because he’s a friggin’ _clerk_ , and he’s still better at tactical thinking than you’ll ever be. If you had it your way, he’d be captain of his own warship, probably a class C or class D, what with his ridiculous attention to detail, and you two would spend the next century or two trying to outdo each other in the field. The Truvians wouldn’t stand a chance. But you don’t get things to go your way, most of the time, and you’re used to it, so you look at it pragmatically. If Eridan were a captain instead of a clerk, you might end up actually admiring him a little and that’d eat at the burning, all-consuming hatred you feel. And that’d be bad, really, because you’ve come to rely on that hatred to keep you focused on the more tedious parts of your work. 

There’s a sweet, sweet humiliation in this arrangement, too. The way he understands things you’re supposed to have proficiency in, and his willingness to learn about those things he doesn’t quite understand as well. He’s still terrible at robotics, but he’s got enough mastery of the basics to at least follow through a conversation, when you’re in the mood to talk about your side projects. You know that science makes his eyes glaze over, but the fact he still bothers to try, just to spite you, is oddly touching. In return, you’ve tried to look at things around you and remind yourself each square inch of your ship has to be requisitioned somehow, and that perhaps the paperpushers have their own struggles with their jobs. Zephyr is generally receptive to your questions, though thankfully at least the greenblood is smart enough to not wonder about your motives. 

You give up on the paragraph and move onto the next, reading it twice because as always, the smileys in the i's keep distracting you. You’ve come to the conclusion they reflect Eridan’s mood as he’s writing, but not necessarily the mood of _what_ he’s writing, which is perfectly confusing and absolutely ridiculous. You wonder if he does it on purpose, but given most of Eridan’s most infuriating quirks are unconscious, you can’t be sure. You type down some notes, nonetheless, both for future simulations and for your reply. You admit you enjoy writing the scathing missives a lot more than you probably should, but there’s something incredibly satisfying about pouring out all those things to someone who actually listens for a change. Especially because he doesn’t automatically dismiss everything you say as worthless hemocastism. Instead, he just argues back, the hateful jerk. 

He sent you a video file, along with the rest of his commentary, and you eye it every now and then, sitting innocuously in its folder. He also told you not to watch it until you were both online, which assures you it’s going to go join a certain, encrypted folder in the depths of your personal husktop that houses a worryingly increasing amount of… _lewd_ materials. You pull a towel out of your sylladex on reflex and quietly wipe off the sweat gathering on your forehead. Maybe one day you’ll find it in yourself to return in kind, but not yet. So far he seems quite content just to witness your reactions, which makes you burn with shame and anger and an unbearable amount of _hate_. 

You close the husktop abruptly and stalk out of the block, snarling at yourself. You can’t quite think straight and you refuse to… to give in to the urges, particularly when you have so much work to do. You vent out your frustration by running a surprise inspection of the hangars, and tell yourself repeatedly that you’re not impatient at all. 

  


* * *

  


caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling centaursTesticle [CT]

CA: wwell look wwhos here  
CT: D--> Eridan  
CA: oooh i see  
CT: D--> Excuse me  
CA: youre doin the testy cranky bitch thing  
CT: D--> Language  
CA: no hello or fuck you or anythin  
CA: so mean, eq  
CT: D--> …I refuse to dignify that with an answer  
CA: nah its okay  
CA: go on  
CA: youll like it

You know he’s right and you hate him for being right and for doing this. You take a deep breath, nonetheless, and start the audio call. Maybe one day you’ll bring yourself to make him _see_ what he’s doing to you. Instead, you shift in your chair and go hunt down that file he sent you. 

“You’re panting, Zahhak,” he says, voice a purr that settles lazily in gut. You can easily imagine the smirk. “Do I win a prize if you ruin your leggings before you even hit play?” 

There are a lot of things about Eridan that are worth hating. His abysmal manners and his vulgar behavior, for instance, which never fail to make you twitch. His obnoxious insecurities and his tendency to just go off doing his thing, on his own time, and care none for the world around him. The way he traded his arrogance for indifference and his penchant to pretend he’s truly satisfied with his lot in life. 

The way he’s so infuriatingly comfortable inside his own skin. 

You absolutely despise him for being so at ease with his own body and its needs. You’ve berated him for the rings, because they are so below his station, but also because it infuriates you, the way he’s simply accepted his… his _perversion_ as a natural part of himself. You hate him when he sits in your lap, face tucked by your ear, and whispers the filthiest things while he plays with your hair. You hate the fact he _demands_ his satisfaction from you and needles you constantly to reciprocate. You hate the way he makes you feel like a lousy kismesis when your tongue trips in your mouth and you can’t quite force the words out. You hate the fact he’s made you _care_ if he finds you lacking. 

You hate him because the more you watch him, the more you feel awkward and clumsy, too big and too strong and too… _wrong_ , somehow. And then he’ll drape himself on your back or sit on your hips, and he’ll reduce you to a sweating, shivering wreck, and you’ll _like_ it. 

“Be quiet,” you snap, annoyed by how sullen and embarrassed the words sound to your own ears, and shift in your seat as you find the file. 

“Go on,” he says, just as the video starts playing and his voice echoes as his feet, of all things, enter the frame. “Remember when I said I was gonna hit the red light district in Maldurth and think of you a lot?” You groan, and find yourself unable to stifle the sound in time. Eridan’s hissing laugh echoes from the messenger program, but not loud enough to obscure the audio of the recording. “I thought of you, Zahhak, I thought of you _long and hard_.” 

Something blue – _your_ blue, and just recognizing the color makes you drench your clothes in sweat – hits the floor between Eridan’s feet. The shape of the toy becomes apparent after a moment, as the gelatinous texture loses enough inertia from the fall to return to its original shape. It’s massive, easily the size of your bulge or perhaps more, and to your absolute mortification, modeled in the shape of a hoofbeast’s own. 

“You did not,” you say, horrified and awed and drowning in arousal slowly clawing its way through your veins. 

Eridan laughs again, quiet and hissing, and in the name of all that’s holy, you _hate_ him. 

In the video, you watch with fascination as he lowers himself onto that monstrosity, the camera placed in such an angle you get you see every excruciating detail as he uses a hand to shove the thing into his nook. Violet drips down his thighs, and you can see the muscles tensing as he slowly goes down, more and more of him entering the frame. 

“See,” the recording says, voice breathy and low in a tone that bypasses your brain and digs straight into your groin, “I figured I’d get you a present. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To get—“ And then he pauses, shivering, as a hand with obnoxiously elegant claws comes pin his bulge against his skin, refusing to let it obstruct the view. “To get fucked on that desk with something big enough you actually feel it, huh?” 

His knees hit the floor and his posture changes, hips slowly rolling back and forth as he fucks himself on that… that _thing_ , gradually taking more and more of it inside. You bite back a whimper at the sounds he makes. His body is visible only up to a few inches above his hips, and you find yourself choking in frustration because you want to see what face he’s making. Then you realize where your train of thought has gone and where your hand is, rubbing absently along the muscles of your thigh, and you find yourself snarling. 

“But then I thought,” the recording goes on, voice airy and almost sickeningly sweet, “it’d be really poor manners to give you a gift without knowing if it was quality or not, right? And you do so loathe poor manners, after all.” 

Before you can gather enough wits to snap at Eridan for his lewd display, the tip of the toy hits his seedflap. You can tell because his entire body spasms for a moment and his voice reaches an unbearably smug note. You watch with fascination as the movement of his hips changes, more of that slick lubrication dripping down the edges of his nook as he tries to coax the toy to curl inside him. The material is flexible enough to do so, although judging by the sounds Eridan makes, it keeps grinding against his seedflap as it goes. 

“When you make that sound,” he says, accent dragging on the vowels in a way that brings a self-satisfied purrbeast to mind, “I can never tell if you’re wet because you’re a gross ball of sweat or because you really want a fuck. Bit of both I suppose, eh?” 

You force yourself to unclench your jaw, lest you break a tooth – you still refuse to afford him the privilege – and hiss at him instead, eyes fixed on the screen and the obscene display on it. There’s still about five inches left for Eridan to take, and he’s visibly straining himself to manage. The muscles of his thighs pull and relax with each roll of his hips, his bulge wound tight around his fingers and his wrist. You have the strangest, most desperate urge to lean in and lick the translucent violet painting trails on his skin. 

“You’re disgraceful,” you manage to snarl out, hunching over the desk and giving into temptation as you shove a hand into the ruined mess that are your pants. “A deranged _deviant_.” 

“Yeah,” Eridan laughs, and you feel your nook clenching furiously around nothing, as in the video a finger slides down Eridan’s bulge to rub at the ridge along the underside. “And you’re a hypocritical harlot. I can use alliteration too, _hon_ , and it still doesn’t change the fact you want to fuck me until we’re rolling in a puddle of slurry and sweat, does it?” 

Abruptly, Eridan stops moving, holding still for one, two breaths, before forcing himself down those last inches with a merciless brutality that makes something in the back of your pan _hunger_. He keens, and oh, he always does keen oh so prettily, the sound drilling its way through your groin into your spine. He slumps forward, not enough for you to see his face, but enough to see the rings lining his gills fluttering as his entire body shakes. Still, you can see him gushing genetic material around the rim of the toy, splattering down his thighs and his legs and the floor. You half expect it to hit the camera – and you wouldn’t put it past him to set it up that way. The video ends then, though, player going black. You’re nowhere near done, yourself, three fingers up your nook and bulge coiled tightly on itself. Your clothes are ruined. The chair is ruined. You dare not touch anything but yourself, until the built up pays off and you’ve come back to your senses. 

And you still have Eridan’s hissing laugh to deal with. 

“It’s pretty quality,” he says, and his voice hitches a little, just enough to make you wonder where his hands are, at the moment. “Your gift, I mean. I’ll make sure to take good care of it til I see you again.” 

You slide a fourth finger into yourself, forcing yourself to ignore the wet sound it makes and stubbornly not worrying if he can hear or not. You vacillate between the memory of him, tight and eager, wrapped around you and greedily taking you all in, and the filthy promise of him shoving that toy – a toy that was inside him, you just _saw_ it go inside him – into you. 

“I hate you,” you sob, rutting against your own hand and trying to stifle the cries with the other one. “Oh, _god_.” 

“I know,” Eridan murmurs, almost dreamily, and then goes quiet as he listens to you fall to pieces. 

  


* * *

  


Eridan Ampora dots his i's with smiley faces. 

He’s infinitely better at strategy than you’ll ever be and delights poking at the holes in all your plans. He’s a filthy, shameless aberration and a traitor to all he was once meant to represent. 

You hate him more than you ever thought possible to hate someone. You hate him when he’s disrupting the precise order of your ship and you hate him more when he’s away, living in mediocrity and content with it. You hate his hair and his horns and his smirks and the infinite patience with which he tears you to shreds with his claws only to painstakingly put you back together more to his liking. 

Eridan Ampora dots his i's with smiley faces. 

Staring at yet another squished comment on the margin of the page, full of distracting i's, you think that, as far as kismesis go, you probably could do much worse. 

**Author's Note:**

> Eridan and Equius have one of the most fascinating relationships in Distraitverse, if nothing else because it's the one kismesissitude where physical violence is almost entirely absent. They're kind of stupidly sweet, except for the part where they hate each other so much. I just think it's really fun.
> 
>  
> 
> [Askblog for this verse.](http://requisitionforms.tumblr.com/)


End file.
